“Deep reading” is defined as a process whereby readers engage in attentive and thoughtful reading in order to enhance their understanding and enjoyment of a text.
A word of caution: not all reading is of equal value. Far from it. The educational value of reading, especially for older students, depends a whole lot on the content of the book that is being read, which hardly needs stating.
Take fiction. Run-of-the-mill pulp fiction meant for poolside leisure tends to have far less intellectual heft than an immersive masterpiece of a novel by Charles Dickens, Stendhal or Dostoyevsky. Albeit this may sound like elitist snobbism, that is hardly the case. Not all works of art are of equal merit and that goes for fiction as well.
Yet it isn’t just the content that matters. The self-imposed engagement of a reader matters too. “Deep reading” is defined as a process whereby readers engage in attentive and thoughtful reading in order to enhance their understanding and enjoyment of a text. It is an involved process of learning and understanding as opposed to skimming and the so-called superficial “slow reading,” which, too, proves certain benefits but generally far more tangential ones.
The term “deep reading” was invented in the mid-1990s by Sven Birkerts, an American essayist and literary critic who is the author The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. In the book, he warns that in our embrace of electronic devices, we may be sacrificing our age-old literary culture. We will be much the worse for it, the critic stresses.
“Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms,” Birkerts writes. “We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book. We don’t just read the words, we dream our lives in their vicinity.”
Birkerts issued this clarion call back in 1994 and if anything the extent of our distraction by our ubiquitous digital devices has worsened to an extent that probably even he could not predict (see following article).
Just as learning to read is an acquired skill, so is learning to read more deeply. Paying close attention to texts does not come naturally to most young people. “Human beings were never born to read,” write Maryanne Wolf and Mirit Barzillai in a scholarly article “The Importance of Deep Reading,” which was published in the journal Educational Leadership.
“We were born to see, move, speak, and think. Genetic programmes unfold for each of these functions as the organism interacts with the environment. Not so with reading,” explain Wolf, a professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Barzillai, a psychologist at the University of Haifa in Israel. “Reading is a new cognitive function, invented only 5,500 years ago, which translates into about a minute before midnight on the clock of human evolution.”
